Studies on electromagnetic interference shielding characteristics of metal nanoparticle- and carbon nanostructure-filled polymer composites in the Ku-band frequency

The dispersion behaviour and electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding properties were investigated for metal nanoparticle- and carbon nanostructure-filled polymer composites. It was observed that carbon nanostructure-polymer composites exhibited a much higher shielding performance than Ag nanoparticle-polymer composites at the same filler loading. The results also showed that Ag nanoparticle-polymer composites could exhibit an ideal shielding performance only with a very high Ag loading (> 30 wt%). The experimental data exhibited that the shielding effectiveness of the polymer composite containing 5 wt% carbon nanotubes could reach more than 20 dB in the measured frequency region, indicating such composites can be applied to the practical EMI shielding materials. In addition, some possible approaches to further improve the shielding performance of carbon nanotube-polymer composites were proposed and discussed.